990FXA headache

[sheepfu]

I am having a bit of a confusing problem that I am hoping that you guys can help with. I am not new to building systems, but this is the first I have encountered issues like this. I replaced my MSI motherboard with a GA- 990FXA because the SATA controller failed on my MSI. All of my hardware was transferred over to the new motherboard. There were however two upgrades. Once being a OCZ 750W power supply, the old one was a 450W, and the other was a new Western Digital 320GB hard drive as my last boot drive was a IDE drive.

Here are the specs

AMD 955BE
GA-990FXA
4 x G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-GBRL (DDR3 1600)
Nvidia Galaxy GTS250
3 SATA hardrives and 1 SATA DVDR

So after assembly, the system fired right up I configured the BIOS to some very basic settings and started installing Windows 7 64. The first strange thing that happened was that after the initial Windows install screen where it asks you where you would like to install and click start. Then, the screen went blank but there was drive activity, so I let it go on. After the system restarted, the screen came up asking for computer names and windows key, after entering the windows key, the system restarted, repeat the second time. So I went into the BIOS, and switched the memory to ganged mode. This time it accepted the key and the monitor went black for the next few minutes, after which, windows started up.

Okay, so then I started installing drivers. A couple of times, the screen would blank and the fans would go to full speed. So I figured, I needed to update the BIOS and see if that would fix the issue. BIOS updated successfully to F6. However this did not alleviate the issues. I could get limited stability and usable sessions of 10-15 minutes at a time until I tried to enable aero in Windows. Now the only consistent thing the system does is crash every time Windows starts to enable Aero. At any time, whether in the BIOS, Windows, or safe mode, I am susceptible to  the system  going blank and the fans going to full speed with only a hard reset to get things going again.

Knowing that people have had issues getting G.skill ram to configure right, I have tried every combination I can think of in the BIOS to see if the RAM settings are causing the crash. I have tried all four sticks individually in every slot to see if I just have a bad stick, but each time the result is the same.

So...any suggestions?

Thanks,

Branton Turner

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

The first thing is to reset your BIOS to Optimised BIOS Defaults which should also clear the Ganged mode that you set your memory to.  This will hopefully help.

When you installed Windows did you have all the drives connected as it is usually a better idea to leave only the target drive and the optical drive attached.

[absic]

Hi there,

which of the GA-990FXA motherboards are you running?

[ex58]

Only UD5 and UD7 has latest BIOS F6.
So,if you have GA-990FXA-UD7,you can try beta BIOS F7e:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/12/20/2696817/99FXAUD7.7e.zip

[sheepfu]

Thanks for the replies. First, I have tried ganged and unganged with no success but I will try the optimized bios settings to see if that does the trick.

I did install with all of the drives connected. I can certainly try again with only the primary drive and see how it goes.

Lastly it is the UD5 version of the board.

Thanks,

Branton Turner

[absic]

hi there,

I did have some similar issues when I first ran this board but they were solved with BIOS updates. Are you running the latest F6 version? If not I would recommend updating to it using QFlash.

Secondly you are better off running your RAM at the default settings of 1333MHz, especially with your current processor. If you haven't already done so check here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2515.0.html for the reason for this.

Have you been able to run MemTest on each stick of RAM individually? If not do this, although it is time consuming it is essential as it will help eliminate the RAM as the cause of the problem.

[sheepfu]

Well, tried new memory and that didn't fix the problem. Tried a new video card, ATI this time, and at the moment that appears to have done the trick. Time will tell.